Let’s Research Immigrant Characters

In

last month’s post,

we began our exploration of writing immigrant characters. We talked about how research can be used as a decision-making tool, and some of the choices to make for your characters. Today, we’re going to get into some of the heavier, yet important, topics when discussing immigration.

Immigration is not a concept relegated to the Western experience. In today’s society, we imagine people leaving their home in the wider world and migrating to three countries—Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. But we have been migrating throughout human history, and no matter what world you build, movement is a key part of it.

In last month’s post, we ironed out where your immigrant characters are moving from and where they’re going, we chose what year they migrated, and we discovered why they moved. Now, we need to explore some of the more difficult aspects of the immigration experience. Namely, politics.

Let’s be clear: nothing that we research today needs to appear in your story. You can comfortably leave that tricky business to political intrigue plot lines, but the simple fact is that politics affects every one of our lives and will have a great impact on how your immigrant characters view the world.

So let’s break it down.

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Step 4: Research immigration policies in your character’s home and destination country.

Here’s a secrets: the powers to be don’t want us to move. Every nation has rules to keep their citizens in and keep others out. Sometimes, those policies are blatantly harsh (like the U.S.’s multiple Anti-Chinese act in the 1800’s), but even when not, entering a new country is extremely difficult.

Likewise, countries put up barriers to keep their people from leaving. Most often, these barriers take the form of governmental fees.

What to look for when researching (or inventing) immigration policies:

• How are families split up when they migrate? How long are they separated for?
• What difficulties do they face when entering the destination country? And conversely, what difficulties do they face if they’re denied?
• What world-views and self beliefs are developed by these difficulties? (They can be positive or negative)

Step 5: Research the political events that occur in your character’s home country around the time of migration.

In my last post, I mentioned that immigrant experiences are very different based on what year they move. We discussed push factors (those things that make people want to leave a country) and pull factors (the things that draw them to the destination country). Now it’s time to dig into your character’s specific situation.

Think about this. When you go to university, or move away for a job, you don’t just forget about everything that happens in your prior home. You keep in touch with friends, your attention is caught whenever your town gets mentioned on the news, and you make sure your parents are okay.

The same is true when someone changes countries, if not more so. Even before the world was connected through the internet, news from other countries traveled. For at least the first generation, people are invested in what happens in their home country, and how it affects the relatives they left behind.

It’s tempting, when doing your research, to focus on the major political events that create turmoil. But remember that you’re creating a character. Characters are individuals, they have their own wants and desires, they are specific and detailed.

In previous steps, we’ve looked at immigration as a whole. Now you want to go to the ground level.

While doing your research, ask yourself:

• Which events affect my characters and their family? Regionally. Occupationally.
• Is this affect immediately harmful or simply involves the chaos of change?
• Do the politics of their home country affect their lives? (i.e., does their destination country react to it in some way?)

After you’ve done your research, brainstorm a list of 5-10 specific ways that these politics have an impact on your immigrant characters’ lives.

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Step 6: How did your character’s family react to immigrating?

Your research is now finish. It’s time to focus in on your character’s life and craft their beliefs and world-views from what they have experienced.

Here is something I discovered as the child of immigrants: Immigrants come from a place where they are the majority and arrive in a place where they are the minority. This is where the true difficulty lies; not in old culture vs new, but in how immigrants view themselves in the old and new places. Things that came easy are suddenly hard. Promises made no longer hold the same weight. Basic needs that were assured (safety, access to food, advancement in your field) are no longer certain.

So how does your immigrant characters’ family respond to these difficulties?

In an earlier post

here,

I talked about four ways your protagonist could react to the difficulties in their Normal World, and I believe these same principles can be applied here.

Avoid/Assimilate:

The whole purpose of assimilation is to avoid conflict. If you act like the majority, talk like the majority, enjoy the same things as the majority, you minimize external conflict. This, as we’ve seen in multiple stories, creates conflict within the family, but if you think about it, assimilation is as natural a reaction as any. If you’re hurting, your instinct is to get away from the hurt, not increase it.

Fight:

Fighting in this scenario looks like holding on to your home culture as tight as you can. Your immigrant characters might view the difficulties they face as an attack, and resort to responding the only way they know how. Just like with assimilation, this is a natural human response. If you don’t have the strategies to deal with a new situation, there isn’t much you can do without help.

Persevere:

How does your immigrant characters try a to find the balance? Which parts of their home culture did they value? What fears drove them to make the choices they made? This is a tricky balance to strike, but if you can pin down the specifics, it will help bring depth to your immigrant characters.

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This post has been a heavy one, but hopefully it has brought some insight to crafting immigrant characters. Let me know in the comments what you think, and what you discovered from your research.

Next post we’ll explore the more day-to-day details about immigrant characters.